


counting the days (since exegol)

by Sasskarian



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Shenanigans, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, OT3 with room to spare, Polyamory, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Soulmates, Spoilers, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, TROS Fix IT
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21929797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sasskarian/pseuds/Sasskarian
Summary: A measure of time, counted in heartbeats, broken smiles, and daily scratches on her New Republic walls. Rey has a Force wound that won't heal, Finn and Poe try to wrangle a government together, and Ben Solo is still dead.Or is he?
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	1. Chapter 1: 37 Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Despite his new and stressful duties, Finn still laughs the way a child laughs, all bubbling delight and infectious joy; the sound is so good, so warm, like home, and for the first time in weeks, Rey find herself laughing too._
> 
> _It’s hard to laugh when you’ve been torn in half._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you subscribed to the fic, you may have gotten an email this morning about a new chapter. I rewrote this first chapter (and will also do the second) before finalizing Ch. 3, which should be this week.

***

Chapter 1

***  
37 days since Exegol  
***

***  
***

“That’s good, Finn.” 

Rey smiles, feeling the Force ebb and flow around Finn as he manages to lift himself a few inches off the ground-- along with the meditation mat, two glasses of water, and the plate of snacks they keep for anyone who comes to visit. Finn cracks an eye open, smiles back at her, and lands with a thump. For half a moment, she almost expects him to be disappointed that his training is progressing slowly: hyper-competency is a Stormtrooper trait he’ll never outgrow.

But that’s not Finn, is it? No. He rocks back on his bottom, laughter spilling out of his mouth. Despite his new and stressful duties, Finn still laughs the way a child laughs, all bubbling delight and infectious joy; the sound is so good, so warm, like home, and for the first time in weeks, Rey find herself laughing too.

It’s hard to laugh when you’ve been torn in half.

She knows she’s been miserable company. Like a star spinning out of an unstable orbit, Rey rockets around the New Republic, bouncing from one distraction to another. She attends the shaky Senate meetings, stands in the back of funerals and memorials, and walks along the shores and rolling hills and alien skies of planets she never thought she’d see. Anytime you see a thin, lonely figure in ivory, chances are it’s Rey.

She once called herself Skywalker. Burying Luke and Leia’s sabers, those last, tiny vestiges of the great Skywalker bloodline, together in the sands of the planet they both hailed from, seemed like the right thing to do. And when she saw their shades, glowing faintly against the harsh horizon, nodding at her and granting her a family name at last, she’d claimed it. For five glorious, blazing minutes under the Tatooine suns, she’d truly been Rey Skywalker, the Last Jedi.

Then the heart palpitations had begun, every muscle in her chest seizing as her lungs screamed for air. As Leia’s face crumpled into concern, her transparent hand stretching towards Rey even as her connection to the Force slammed shut against the ghastly, infected place where Ben had been before Exegol. 

Before Rey Palpatine had surfaced from the murky depths of a past she’d buried under Jakkian sands and the endless work to survive.

***

“You two seem to be in a good mood,” Poe says, setting a bag of food on the counter and side-eyeing the half-thawed bag of vegetables sitting in the sink. “What’d I miss?”

“Finn whacked himself in the head with a chair,” Rey says, tattling on their partner without hesitation. 

“Oh,” says Poe, blinking. “And… that happened how, again?”

Finn groans from the sofa, a noise like a pained bantha, setting Rey into another muffled giggle-fit. Poe settles on the arm of the sofa, fingers gently ghosting over the egglet-sized lump on Finn’s forehead as he winces in sympathy. “That’s a pretty nasty lump,” he says mildly. 

“The Force hates me.” Finn sounds absolutely pitiful. Those big brown eyes flutter as Poe kisses his fingertips and strokes his hair, murmuring the right sympathetic noises. “I was practicing and doing _fine_ and then--”

“And then BB-8 told us you’d gotten out of Session early, and Finn lost his concentration,” Rey finishes for him, still smiling a little. Finn makes a grumpy noise, following the touch of Poe’s hand like an ack-puppy looking for more pets. It’s stupidly cute, and one of the reasons Rey likes living with them, even if she’s not quite sure how the three of them fit together sometimes. But the way Poe and Finn look at each other grounds her in reality, usually, and reminds her that sometimes, some love stories work out. “The chair he was levitating retaliated.”

Finn groans again. “It _hates_ me.”

True to form, Poe can’t resist the urge to kiss away Finn’s troubles whenever possible, and Rey looks away to give them a moment. Some love stories work out, yes, and she loves Finn and Poe more than almost anything else. But that doesn’t stop the way bitterness floods her mouth as the memory of Ben surfaces, and it isn’t until Poe gently squeezes her knee (and she throttles back the near-instinctive urge to break his fingers off from a lifetime of fending off handsy scavengers on Jakku) that she comes back to the moment. His brow furrows and she reaches for him, smoothing out the lines of his frown with her thumb. 

“I’m okay,” she says, answering his unspoken question. It’s mostly a lie, but she has to say it. Most days, she’s okay enough. “Just… listening to the Force.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but Poe has learned to be gracious when someone doesn’t want to talk, so he shrugs, and smiles for her anyway. “Always the Force with you people.”

***

The apartment isn’t totally quiet until nighttime. And even then, Finn snores softly, and Poe mutters space vectors in his sleep. BB-8 hums just under the edge of her hearing, charging in the droid port right outside her door. 

Sometimes she wonders if he’s trying to watch over her too, in his own strange way.

Silently, she slips out of her bed and pads to the closet. Luke’s journals and the crumbling Jedi texts sit on a shelf, along with a scorched chunk of rubble and a folded piece of tattered black fabric. The simple shirt has long since stopped smelling like Ben, but she can feel traces of his last moments on it still. Psychometry is a common Jedi power, but hers seems unusually strong; fabric is a poor conductor for Force echoes and shouldn’t feel like anything, but when she lays her hand on it and opens the smallest crack in her mind, Ben all but floods in. 

Love tinged with despair washes over her, like the staticky flashes of the Citadel. Her heart beats faster, damn near thumping out of her ribs, as his intense relief hits her, the way he’d felt looking into her eyes, kissing her for the first and last time, and his peaceful resignation. And you know, part of her, the part that sounds like Luke and Leia, understands. The cosmic balance equation makes sense: for a life to be restored, another must be traded. She’d been brought back, so the Force took him as payment.

But the rest of her _screams._ How can there be balance now? Yes, she carries both Light and Dark, but she is wounded to her very core. All of the Resistance survivors are scarred from their battles, but Rey is downright _broken._

Part of her is missing. No metaphors here, she thinks: when she examines the tangled mess of her own Force signature, she ends in splinters, a soul-wound that gushes out light and Force energy into a vast, empty silence where Ben should have been. Palpatine had drained their bond to restore himself, to cast that awful, powerful lightning. But from all she can read, every piece of half-forgotten lore and all the Jedi ruins she can find without running too far from the Republic, a bond like theirs should have renewed itself. Or at least started to. 

If they had a power like life itself, an infinite loop of life and Force circling between them, why had he died? 

Rey swipes at her face, unsurprised to find tears smearing her hand. She spends a lot of nights like this, curled into corner, holding on to scraps of the past. Too many nights. 

Up in the corner of the closet, starting as high as she can reach, are a series of tally marks. Compared to the legions of them on her walls on Jakku, it’s a laughable start. There’s only thirty-seven of them so far. She knows, before she goes to bed, that she’ll add the thirty-eighth. They’re a private thing, something she doesn’t have to share with the boys. Not that she’s ashamed, or worried about angering them; neither of them would give half an Antarian kath-crap about the damage. They never paid a security deposit, and the only reason they pay rent for a too-spacious apartment is because Finn pulled some alarmingly effective puppy eyes on the landlord. 

But they do care about her. Explicably, the three of them are linked, moving in a shared rhythm like parts of each other. And because they care about her, they’d care about the visible marks of a pain she doesn’t really have words for yet. 

What words can capture the loss? How do you sum up the grief threatening to swallow her whole, the loss not just of Right Then-- Ben’s face in her hand, his lips on hers, his Force pouring into her own-- but the loss of _all that could have been._ Of all the possible futures, good or bad or impossible, that Palpatine robbed her of. Robbed _them_ of.

Finn knows, sometimes, that she’s not as okay as she pretends. As his own connection to the Force strengthens, as Rey tires more and the thick shields padding her mind and her wounded soul develop cracks, he’ll come find her. On those nights, usually she’s already left the closet, left her secrets carved into the wall and collecting dust on the shelf, and Finn will scoop her into his arms and carry her to the couch. There’s no judgement in him. He knows or senses or maybe just empathizes with her pain, and he’ll sit with her when she cries herself hollow in the long, lonely hours of the night when she can’t stand looking at those marks. 

And Poe knows, because Finn knows. On the mornings when he wakes up alone, finding Finn sprawled out on the sofa snoring at the ceiling, and Rey curled into a ball so tight she might break if she moves the wrong way, it’s Poe who starts the kaf brewing, who puts the kettle on. It’s Poe who tosses a blanket over them, and turns the news holos on silent, and puts himself on text-only from the burgeoning responsibilities to their new Republic. 

Sometimes she wonders if they regret moving in together. 

A pilot-turned-reluctant-politician, a stormtrooper-turned-force-adept-turned-general, and a scavenger-turned-jedi shouldn’t a home make. Finn has his own nightmares, and Poe does too. In their own ways, they each are counting the days since Exegol. 

Tonight, though, Finn sleeps soundly, curled around Poe. Rey brushes the metal dust off her fingers as she carves another mark, thinking about how that strange, lonely girl from Jakku had died in the cold, blue light of the Citadel. And the Rey who’d been brought back, who’d felt such surety and belonging for a precious few moments, was left alone while a dream she’d barely had faded away in her arms.

***

_Rey._

The whisper tries to pull her out of the fitful sleep she’s managed. 

_Rey!_

“No.” Rey burrows under her covers, refusing to open her eyes. It isn’t the first time his voice has drifted through her dreams, but damned if she’s going to watch him die all over again. Her ritual for the night is done, and if she’s going to make tomorrow’s Senate meeting, she needs more than an hour of broken rest. Her hand creeps up to her chest, pressing against that roaring wound as if she could stop the ache with willpower alone. “You’re dead.”

_You’re dead, and I’m alone. I’ve always been alone. Palpatine saw to that._

A breeze like a sigh brushes across the top of her head, and the voice fades. Tomorrow, she decides. Tomorrow, she’ll look through those damn texts again. She’ll do away with that chunk of Palpatine’s throne, and search Luke’s words for anything to heal herself. Tomorrow, she’ll take Luke’s X-wing, _her_ X-Wing now, and search out answers. She’ll raze the whole damn Force down, shake out all its ghosts, to find something, anything, to get some bloody peace.

Then she snorts out an ugly little laugh. As if Ben Solo had ever let her lie in _peace_.

Rey dares to crack an eye, half-relieved and half-disappointed that there is no gently-glowing, lost Solo boy standing next to her. The apartment comes back all clear when she sweeps it with her mind. Everything is as it should be: her boys, their droid, and the ghost of a love she's never sure was meant to be or not. 

The ancient texts won’t have anything useful to say. She knows that. They never do, not on this topic. And Rey spends so much time minimizing herself in the Force to reduce the pain, no ghost has come to her since Tatooine. So in a way, tomorrow never comes. Just like it never came on Jakku, when she spent so many of them waiting for parents she always knew, somewhere, weren’t coming back. But it makes her feel a little better to tell herself she’s going to do something about her sorry state anyway.

***

On the other side of Hanna City, the Silver Sea churns. As sleep steals over a lone Jedi, whispers slither through the world. Thunder rumbles in the distance, winds whipping waves to the shore like racing beasts, smashing into the coastal cliffs with a fury sharp enough to bring stones tumbling to the beaches.


	2. 42 Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _To say Ben Solo wakes up isn’t entirely accurate._
> 
> _'Waking up' is too quiet a description for what happens._

***  
Chapter 2

***

42 days since Exegol

***

To say Ben Solo wakes up isn’t entirely accurate. 

'Waking up' is too quiet a description for what happens: A piece of him stirs, rolling slowly to life, and then. Then he is _awake_ , shaken to like a meteor meeting a volcano on a backwater world, all bright explosions and soundless fury, rippling devastation across the entirety of his existence. Awareness and pain floods his every sense, the Force pouring into him like a waterfall into a ravine, filling and filling until he can barely breathe through the assault. It’s as if his every atom is saturated, dripping pure Force energy, exploding across every point in time and space.

Ben screams, half sobbing and curling into himself until he is as small as he can get, shielding whatever he can from the storm of voices around him.

_I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand._

_I see the face of my son._

_Kylo Ren is_ dead.

_I saw your future. Just the shape of it._

_Be with me. Be with me._

The voices blend together, beating at him over and again until he can feel the shape of every letter, symbol, and word etched into his soul. Rey’s voice overlays it all, whispering his name with fervor, the despair in her heart stabbing through his until his own name is an onslaught. _Ben. Ben. Ben, please. Ben ben bEN BEN BE—_

_Shh, Ben. Shh._ A cool hand brushes his hair from his face and he shudders. Through the panic, the warmth of Leia’s presence rolls through him, a balm on his overexposed nerves, and he sobs again, for an entirely different reason. _You’re safe._

That bright light cradles him, tucks him in close under stirring memories of Aldaraanian lullabies and that smile that shines like the sun. Always such a calming presence, his mother. Her strength was nothing like his or Rey’s, nothing so apparent or stated. Leia Organa’s strength rested not in her back, nor in her connection to the Force, but in her heart. A heart that, despite him breaking it over and over, carried such love and forgiveness, to remake a broken shell of a man into someone to be proud of. 

It had been her light calling to his own on Kef Bir. 

“Mom—”

_I know._ She pauses. _That’s your father’s line, you know._ Her laugh shudders around him, swirling through the Force with merriment and joy unfelt for decades. How many times, Ben asks himself, had he dreamed of coming home, and letting his mother wrap him in her love one more time? 

Too many. Too many wasted opportunities, too many years spent drowning in Kylo Ren’s filth. “Where—”

_Later, kiddo,_ his father whispers from somewhere nearby. Han’s presence rumbles, the sound of mountains shifting against one another to move the stars if he decides to. _Just rest. You’re going to need it._

From his thrashing, or from the wounds he can still feel outlining his very soul, or maybe just from the sheer exhaustion of… however he got to wherever he is, Ben’s mind stutters, stumbles to a halt, and he embraces the darkness. It’s not the darkness he’d been smothered under after what happened with his uncle, and it’s not quite the darkness of death— a darkness he somehow knows he felt but can’t bring himself to remember. Probably for the best, in honesty.

This dark is warm and shot through with a lattice of love and comfort, with the murmurs of his mother, and oh, oh his father’s, of Luke’s farmboy laugh, and other voices he knows he knows from somewhere. Some time. They make up a soothing counterpart to the cacophony of pain he’d woken to. 

Ben will worry about specifics later. In the morning, or whatever passes for periods of time in this… place-that-isn’t-a-place, he’ll let himself worry and pick apart and throw every half-baked theory he’d ever read under Luke’s teachings at his situation until it makes some sort of sense. Until then, he tucks himself into the gentle threads of Rey’s voice, still loosely linked with Leia, and lets himself drift on the slow, serene currents of light. His soul is… tired, and craves nothing but the peace of this. And for once, he can allow himself to have it. 

_Ah._ A new voice speaks, twined with the impression of a hand wrinkled by age and wisdom resting on his. _Rest you must, young Solo._

_Done your work is not._

**Author's Note:**

> So, a quick and dirty disclaimer that unlike basically all of my other fics, I'm going to strive to let this one flow naturally and without too much editing. I don't want it to be perfect, I want it to be free. I want it to be a little messy and a little chaotic and I want it to break hearts and then mend them again. So brace yourselves for a little purple prose, a good shot of angst, and a romantic whirlwind. The chapters might be short, or long, or... I don't know. But I walked out of the theater loving Ben Solo enough to write unbeta'd fic and that's saying something.


End file.
